They are the largest laboratories ever built by man. From the outside, they look like large tunnels, which can be straight or ring-shaped and can be several kilometers long. Inside them, the particles that make up atoms – such as protons and electrons – are accelerated to speeds close to the speed of light. During the journey through the great tunnel, they collide with obstacles or even with each other. For what? For scientists to better understand the tiniest components of matter. Quarks, for example, which form protons and neutrons, were only discovered in accelerators. Only with this type of equipment is it possible to break up incredibly dense particles millions of times smaller than the atom. On the one hand, you can say that accelerators are a kind of gigantic microscope, since they allow the observer to know what is inside the smallest particles. On the other hand, they can be considered a kind of time machine.
After all, they show us what the universe was made of before the atoms themselves formed. Another function of this sophisticated equipment is to research what happens in the world of relativistic speeds – so called because of the Theory of Relativity, created by the great German physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955). The famous theory predicts bizarre events for matter if its speed approaches that of light. Under these conditions, the particles have a mass 20 times greater and live ten times longer. For a muon, a type of particle that lives only two millionths of a second, that’s not much. But if it were possible to keep a human being at that speed he would theoretically live almost 1000 years! Ultimately, only the big accelerators are capable of putting this strange world of physical theories into practice. Smaller, room-sized accelerators have other applications.
They create jets of particles useful, for example, in medicine. “A cancer tumor can be fought with beams of protons created in accelerators”, says physicist Alejandro Szanto, head of the Department of Nuclear Physics at the University of São Paulo (USP).
artificial big bang This is the largest particle accelerator on Earth
This is the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) accelerator, which was assembled near Geneva, Switzerland. Its construction cost 618 million dollars a year. See now what happens inside its gigantic structure
1. Inside the 27 km ring, billions of protons, propelled by very strong magnets, are thrown against each other at a speed close to that of light (300,000 km/s)
2. More than 40 million shocks happen every second. This occurs inside detectors, so that physicists know where and how the particles resulting from collisions will appear.
3. When two protons collide, they shatter into quarks, electrons and photons
4. Almost instantly, quarks come together to form so-called mesons. There are also muons – a type of electron 207 times heavier than normal.
5. By studying these particles, physicists can better understand the nature of matter and get an idea of how it formed after the Big Bang